Posts

The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) released its long-awaited report on teacher preparation last week and, to the surprise of almost no one, it was a devastating critique of the nation’s colleges of education. The full report, which provides data on 1,130 institutions and ratings for 608 of them based on a rigorous four-star […]

Concerns about the fragility of democracy are coming from across the political spectrum, as illustrated by the appearance of essays and interviews in the last couple of weeks from representatives of both ends of it, for example, Donald Kagan of Yale University from the right and columnist E. J. Dionne from the left. And they […]

Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute has recently written very provocatively that Pell Grants shouldn’t be used to pay for remedial courses in college and suggests that students should only be eligible for these grants if enrolled in for-credit courses. He notes that a large portion of the $40 billion investment in this […]

The firestorm over standardized testing in the K-12 accountability system that has been building in Texas for over two years is coming to a major showdown, and the primary context of the debate is with House Bill 5, which passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 145-2 and was passed out of the […]

As I write, the NCAA basketball championship game is upon us, and there is no bigger spectacle in college athletics than the Final Four. And I’m a big fan, but I continue to worry about the imbalances in the way we measure and reward success for these young athletes and the schools they represent. I […]

To say that the University of Colorado has not recently been widely known for conservative thought would be an understatement (remember the long-running Ward Churchill episode of a few years ago?). But congratulations are in order for its recent announcement that Steven Hayward, a former Heritage Foundation fellow, has been named the University’s first visiting […]

Maybe I shouldn’t have been, but I was struck by an article in the Wall Street Journal noting the outrage by the higher education establishment that met the comments by North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory when he expressed in a radio interview his concern that many recent college graduates cannot find jobs and suggested that […]

Charles Murray is being his usual provocative self, this time with an essay for the Cato Institute entitled, “The Coming Collapse of the BA Bubble” (Cato’s Letter, Winter 2013), in which he contends that we have become so obsessed with the BA in its gateway function that it has created what he calls a “two-tiered […]

It was encouraging to note that the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) will soon release its national study on how Teachers Colleges do business and how their methods relate to the effectiveness of their graduates in public school districts across the country. Letter grades A-F will be assigned, and the results will be published […]

Congratulations to the National Association of Scholars (NAS) and its Texas affiliate on the release of a very instructive study of the American history curriculum at The University of Texas (UT) and Texas A&M University (A&M), and for the initiative to shed light on the required foundational American history courses at the state’s two flagship […]